When Charlie Sheen recently made headlines by shouting “lying faggot assholes” at the opening of his new bar in Cabo, the joke was that it was “homophobic” nature of his words that constituted something truly scandalous. Charlie’s whore-mongering and cocaine habit are not controversial — “Hey, who are we to judge?” — but it’s an impermissible ThoughtCrime for him to speak the word “faggot.”

This reveals the totalitarian impulse behind identity politics and what is dismissively called “political correctness”: Attempting to control thought by setting boundaries on language, supposedly to protect those who are victimized and oppressed by society. It is not necessary to present evidence that Charlie Sheen has ever harmed homosexuals — or that his words were motivated by hostility to homosexuals — in order for the Thought Police to make a political example of him with the casual accusation of “homophobia.”

The moral of the story is clear: Whore-mongers and drug addicts are OK with the Thought Police, but woe be unto ye homophobes!

Griffin is what is known, in gay jargon, as a “fag hag”: A woman who tries to be “one of the boys” by hanging around gay bars.

The psychology of the fag hag is probably worth an essay of several thousand words that I don’t feel an urge to write today, except to say that these are usually rather unattractive women who seem to derive a secondhand frisson from socializing with ostentatiously gorgeous men in a hypersexualized environment. This satisfies an immature impulse — a desire for superficial “popularity” — and provides the fag hag with a low-risk source of male companionship, along with an obvious excuse to protect herself from feelings of sexual rejection.

Which, if you’re Kathy Griffin, you’ve had to deal with a lot.

Griffin has parlayed her fag-hag act into a career, having discovered that gay men will buy tickets to hear ugly women tell raunchy jokes, in much the way that its always the old fat drag queens who serve as wisecracking emcees for transvestite beauty pageants. Ace of Spades remarks on Griffin’s act:

Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance. . . .
Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort — liberal, urban, sexually loose.

Two words, Ace: Disposable income.

Unlike the respectable bourgeois suburban Republicans working to pay their mortgages and send their kids to college, the hip urbanites have money to throw away on name-brand fashion products and other gaudy expensive baubles that the Wal-Mart shoppers don’t buy. Also, the urban market in New York, L.A. and D.C. includes people who are cultural trend-setters in ways that pudgy accountants in New Jersey, Bakersfield and Fauqier County can never hope to be. But I digress . . .

In return for purchasing a subscription, Sullivan promises his readers, “No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews … just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
For now, Sullivan is offering readers a chance to sign up for $19.99 a year, which he notes, “translates to $1.67 a month.”

Translation: “I think I can make more money this way, but let me drape this crude financial calculus in a lot of altruistic anti-commercial argle-bargle, just to maintain my credibility as an intellectual idealist — which is, of course, my stock in trade.”

Me? I’m just a Shameless Capitalist Blogger, reminding you once more of The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

What all this glosses over, I think, is that The Daily Beast didn’t want to keep Sullivan on.
I wonder why?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, it was regarded as something of a coup for Tina Brown to sign Sullivan in April 2011. Now, barely a year and a half later, she decides he’s not worth the cost of keeping? Hmmmm.

Mr. Sullivan said in an e-mail message that he could have remained at the Daily Beast under a new contract. But he said that as he and his two partners started negotiating, they “began to see the overpowering logic of real independence.”
He added that the Dish is going to stay in New York City, where he and his two business partners are based, “for the foreseeable future.” He added, “We need to be together as a group.”

It’s important to understand that Sully had “real independence” at his blog for many years, from 2000 until he transferred it under Time magazine’s editorial umbrella. He subsequently switched it from Time to the Atlantic and then to Tina’s Daily Beast, so that he’s been sort of a blogging free agent all along.

So it’s difficult to see why, amid contract negotiations with Tina, “the overpowering logic of real independence” should suddenly occur to Sully and his business partners. Something about this narrative doesn’t exactly add up, does it?

Comments

http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

Quit picking on Kathy Griffin. She thought it was an audition.

http://leatherpenguin.com/ TC_LeatherPenguin

So, St. Andrew of the Heart-aching Gobsmack is now officially on my Deathwatch list. I doubt there are enough suckers on the planet to keep his beagles fed, nevermind cover the salaries, hosting fees, etc…..

http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

” it’s an impermissible ThoughtCrime for him to speak the word “faggot.””

No one tell them about that word’s appearance in a poem in “The Hobbit”.

http://www.leftbankofthecharles.com/ Charles

“Kissed the sardine” just replaced “jumped the shark” in the lexicon. Why you’d watch Kathy Griffin on CNN when you could watch Megyn Kelly on Fox is beyond me.

http://opinion.ak4mc.us/ McGehee

Am I the only one who remembers Sully’s desperate fundraising plea years ago, when he claimed he needed (IIRC) 80 grand to keep his blog going?

The reason I reember it is, shortly thereafter I began a fundraiser of my own with a target amount of (and I quote) EIGHT BUCKS.

And I hit my goal, too. The tipjar hasn’t been the same since.

I’m pretty sure my contributors got more value for their money too.

http://twitter.com/Fausta Fausta

pudgy accountants in New Jersey
Actually, all the accountants I’ve met in NJ are trim.

http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

Stacy wrote: The psychology of the fag hag is probably worth an essay of several thousand words that I don’t feel an urge to write today….

I remember. He’d whine about bandwidth costs and what not 2, 3 times a year, and after every single fundraising stint he’d use the loot to go on an extended P-Town holiday.

Quartermaster

So long Sully! Good riddance to bad rubbish and a total waste of bandwidth and pixels. Not to mention Oxygen, but time will take care of that for us.

http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

I’m pretty sure my contributors got more value for their money too.

A lot more.

But hey, you do not have maintain a pad in P-Town.

Freddie Sykes

A Fag Hag provides the inestimable service of convincing gay men to stay gay. Kathy Griffin has been banned from many lesbian watering holes as she is just plain bad for business.

section9

Like I said on twitter, we could email Andrew and tell him that we’re getting a gift subscription for Trig, just to see what he’d say.
As to Griffin? Jesus, have you seen that woman without makeup? I don’t know how she gets laid. I just don’t. I do know why she is angry at Palin all the time.

http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

And Sully is looking for “suckers” for his new business model. How appropriate for Kathy to give him some free publicity in that regard.

JeffS

Maybe Kathy was confused about the time, and started her night job early.

http://wizbangblog.com/ Adjoran

Poor Sully. If the NYT can’t make a subscription model work, how does he expect to? Or does he have a Mexican billionaire anxious to subsidize him, too?

“The most beautiful words in the English Language are, “Pay to the order of: ”
RAH

icowrich

I don’t think Sullivan is pretending to be following a selfless business model. His most compelling argument against ads is the way it slows down the servers. As someone who runs moderately trafficked web site, myself, I can attest to the effect these ads have on server performance.

Of COURSE he wants to maximize income, but he’s being transparent about what he makes, which I think is refreshing, and he is making it very easy to read his content without paying a nickle.